Sales pitch has rings attached

Buy a house, get a bride.

Deborah Hale is serious about that. Well, mostly serious. She listed her Denver house for sale on EBay, with a unique incentive: Buy the house for $600,000, get her as a wife.

EBay, presuming that the 48-year-old jewelry designer was actually interested in a transaction that was not of a real estate nature, pulled her ad.

But Hale has re-listed her house there (without the marriage angle), and also spells out her intentions on her own website, housewithbride.com.

“Clearly, I am not selling myself,� Hale said. “I would hate for that misconception to be there.�

The response to her ad and website has been ample, but not all communications have come from marriage-minded men. She’s sorting through about 3,000 respondents, she said.

She got the idea for the unusual real estate offer when she was considering selling her 1910 bungalow because the three-bedroom, three-bath house seemed too big. “I felt the house needed to be lived in by a couple or a family,� Hale said.

Then she started thinking about how she really wants to get married: “I decided to find a creative way to meet these two needs in my life right now.�

“Anyone can bid on the home,� she explained. “But I’m hoping there’s a man out there who looks at the house and looks at me and might be interested in sharing it with me. I believe in courtship and dating and marriage.�